1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of information technology systems management, and more particularly relates to a method and system for automating the management of information technology systems is disclosed.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today, information drives business, providing an organization with improved productivity and workflow. For businesses that increasingly depend on data and information for their day-to-day operations, such information technology systems are thus of critical importance. As dependence on such information technology systems has increased, the importance of efficiently and effectively managing such systems has also increased. Businesses are thus becoming increasingly aware of the costs and resources consumed by such management needs.
As used above, information technology (IT) typically concerns the design, organization, updating, operation and maintenance of networked computer systems. Such networks can be used not only for business, of course, but also for education, entertainment or other purposes. An entity such as a company, school or the like, usually has one or more IT employees whose job is to make sure computing resources such as computers, storage, software, communication and so on, are available to users.
As computer networks have become larger and more complex, the job of building and maintaining a network grows. The user base for a network often has needs that change with time. For example, a company may have a large need to run workplace applications such as word processing, database accessing, email, etc., during normal working hours. Some employees may do intermittent testing of software under development that uses a large number of computers, servers, or other resources. Data maintenance, such as database synchronization, data backup and the like, is performed from time-to-time.
Often, resources on a network are shared, such that computers, disk drives, communication paths and other such computing resources need to be allocated to make sure that users do not experience unwanted delays and that processes complete within desired times. The ability to determine where resources are needed and to quickly allocate resources is important to make full use of network and computation ability in an IT system. Such ability is achieved through IT management resources
Whenever the workload spikes or maintenance is required, or in general, to respond to dynamic computing needs, IT managers must therefore perform manual processes to adapt the given computing infrastructure (or more simply, infrastructure) to the business's dynamic and ever-changing needs. The various needs of business, infrastructure changes and issues involving software applications drive dynamic workloads. Such business needs include the broadcasting of events and launching of products, software testing, peak-load hosting, customer support operations, high availability applications, web services and the like. Workload management typically includes two phases: (1) “detection” of varying workload and (2) “dynamic response” to varying workload. The “detection” phase typically detects changes in infrastructure including traffic management, host monitoring, network design, policy enforcement, cluster management and the like. The “dynamic response” phase typically includes making changes to the computing infrastructure by re-allocating (adding, removing, changing) infrastructure resources to adapt to the detected changes. Issues involving software applications also often include business processing, infrastructure, decision support, application development, collaborative applications, technical applications and the like. These new and diverse uses typically require labor-intensive operations to keep pace with the dynamic nature of such IT workloads. The manual nature of these key workload management tasks translates into high costs, slow response times and a greater likelihood of errors.
Some IT management functions are assisted by automated tools. For example, software for traffic monitoring, system and cluster management, storage utilization, etc., can be loaded and run while IT resources are being used productively. Such programs present information to IT employees who can then act on the information to configure or modify portions of the network, computers, or other resources, to provide better utilization, provisioning and other such advantages.
Although software exists to assist in reconfiguration and management, a large part of IT management is still performed manually by IT employees. Also, much software that does exist is not integrated. Software created by one manufacturer may not work well with other software from a different manufacturer. Some software applications or tools for IT management focus on either system monitoring or network traffic monitoring. Others have limited deployment tools for operating systems or applications.
The development of the mainframe workload management market has thus not translated to workload management solutions in the server and workstation markets. Furthermore, rapid innovation in IT infrastructure has increased heterogeneity of devices and resources on a network, while application demand has grown rapidly, both in the number of users and in types of uses of IT infrastructure. As a result, the fundamental needs of workload management have changed dramatically. Workload management needs to not only address disparate sources of workload monitoring, but also automate the response to IT workload variance via resource de-commissioning and re-commissioning in addition to resource control, provision, and update. From a business perspective, effective resource utilization, high availability, and reliability are unachievable without automated workload management.
As will be appreciated, then, the performance of information technology systems is maintained through the careful management of the computing resources that make up such systems, and therefore, such information technology systems often confront challenges such as those noted above. What is therefore needed is a technique that addresses these challenges. Such a solution should be capable of dynamically and automatically adapting such IT systems to changing IT requirements by drawing IT resources such as servers, software stacks, IP addresses, licenses, network elements, and storage, from a pool of resources for dynamic, just-in-time commissioning and de-commissioning based on dynamic demands on these heterogeneous IT resources. Moreover, such a solution should preferably do so with minimal supervision, in order to minimize the workload incurred in managing such systems, and should do so in as efficient a manner as is reasonably possible.